Ginnie Mae continues to wrestle with issuers lacking liquidity and net worth although the number of such cases has gone down significantly, thanks to tight oversight, according to the agency’s top counterparty risk officer. Briefing participants at this year’s Ginnie Mae summit in Washington, DC, Zack Skochko, director of counterparty risk, reported that some issuers are still struggling to comply with Ginnie Mae’s liquidity and net worth requirements.A number of small issuers failed their liquidity and net worth audits this year by not maintaining the minimum $1 million cash or 10 basis points of outstanding Ginnie securities required to participate in the agency’s mortgage-backed securities program. Ginnie Mae also requires issuers to meet a minimum net worth of $2.5 million plus 35 bps of the issuer’s total effective single-family obligations The requirements were designed to ensure that the ...

Nonbank loan administrators expanded their share of the mortgage servicing market during the second quarter, mostly capturing agency business abandoned by large banks, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. Commercial banks, savings institutions and credit unions reported a combined single-family servicing portfolio of $6.930 trillion as of the end of June, according to call reports. That was down 0.5 percent from the previous quarter despite the fact that the total depository portfolio holdings of unsecuritized mortgages increased 1.7 percent during that period. But bank, thrift and credit union loan servicing for others – typically loans held in mortgage-backed securities trusts – fell...[Includes two data tables]

With liquidity and an uncertain regulatory environment dominating this year’s Ginnie Mae summit in Washington, DC, top agency officials called on stakeholders and other market participants to stand up to the challenges posed by a rapidly evolving Ginnie marketplace. Chief among those challenges is the growing domination of the Ginnie market by independent mortgage bankers, who now account for 80 percent of the agency’s monthly issuance volume. Ginnie President Ted Tozer reiterated his concerns raised last year about the increasing number of nonbanks in the agency mortgage-backed securities market with very little experience and liquidity. In his opening remarks, Tozer acknowledged...

Impac Mortgage Holdings late last week came to market with a “follow-on” offering of 3 million shares of common stock, the first public equity sale by a pure-play mortgage company in almost three years. Unfortunately, investors were not happy. When the shares hit the New York Stock Exchange last Friday, not only did Impac’s stock price tumble almost 9.0 percent, but it has continued to drift downward, resting at just over $13.00 a share as Inside Mortgage Finance went to press this week. The share price of the nation’s 28th largest originator hit...

Some residential mortgage-backed securities loan originators are moving away from performing internal post-acquisition quality control loan reviews in lieu of obtaining feedback from their whole loan investors, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. “Some aggregators are relying more on their investors for quality control feedback,” said Moody’s. The ratings service identified in particular Redwood Residential Acquisition Corp. and JPMorgan Mortgage Acquisition Corp., which it said “are relying more on feedback from whole loan investors to monitor the quality of due diligence firm loan reviews, as opposed to conducting their own internal reviews, since a large portion of their acquisitions are sold in whole-loan trades.” Moody’s noted...

Regulations and practices in the mortgage market will help protect investors in MBS backed by residential mortgages from marketplace lenders, according to Moody’s Investors Service. However, it’s not clear if the protections will be enough to offset the rating penalties often applied to originators and assets that lack historical performance records. Moody’s published its analysis last week, noting that while no residential MBS has been issued by a marketplace lender as yet, the firm expects issuance at some point. Marketplace lenders – the most prominent of which is Social Finance – connect...

Investors in auto loan ABS may need to buckle up. Both prime and subprime auto loan ABS have weakened month-over-month and year-over-year, according to S&P Global Ratings. “Collateral performance in the U.S. prime auto loan ABS sector was weaker in July, with net losses and 60-plus-day delinquencies increasing month-over-month, while recovery rates decreased,” the S&P analysts said. “Collateral performance for the subprime sector deteriorated...

Retail lending through brick-and-mortar branches and consumer-direct programs was the biggest production channel in conventional mortgage lending but had a somewhat smaller share in government-insured lending, according to an exclusive analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. Retail production played a dominant role in the jumbo market, where it accounted for 79.3 percent of originations over the 18-month period ending in June 2016. Correspondent production played a meaningful role, accounting for 16.1 percent of jumbo originations, but brokers (4.6 percent) had a relatively thin share of the jumbo market. Brokers’ strength was...[Includes one data table]

Originations of mortgages to first-time homebuyers in recent years have performed better than other purchase mortgages securitized by the government-sponsored enterprises, according to an analysis by Moody’s Investors Service. The stronger performance of first-time homebuyers occurred even as purchase mortgages for repeat buyers tend to have stronger borrower characteristics. The rating service suggested that tighter underwriting coupled with borrower education and counseling have improved the performance of GSE first-time homebuyer mortgages. Moody’s said...

Although single-women borrowers are more likely to pay their mortgages on time than single-male borrowers, they tend to pay higher mortgage rates and are more often denied credit. Those findings come from a new Urban Institute study that merged Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for 2004-2014 with CoreLogic data on loan performance. A combination of a male and female borrower (usually in that order) accounted...